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FROM JUDITH TO DORIGEN: THE FEMININE EMBODIMENT OF VIOLENCE IN MEDIEVAL ENGLISH LITERATUREAllyn Kate Pearson (18857740) 02 July 2024 (has links)
<p dir="ltr">When one thinks of the medieval past, one might think of knights with their shining armor and swords; these are warriors. My dissertation seeks to examine and expose how “warriors” are gendered as masculine; a person or character categorized as a warrior might be assumed to be a man unless otherwise specified to be a “woman warrior.” The need for the qualifying adjective (“woman” or “female”) illustrates that the maleness of warriorhood and violence is understood as implicit. This governing assumption affects how women’s actions, particularly women’s violent actions, are interpreted. This dissertation takes women’s violence as a starting point, examining characters from Judith to Chaucer’s Dido. I show how and why the violence these women enact cannot be relegated to, say, maternal instinct or spirituality. The spiritual warrior is herself impressive, of course; she is a tool, a weapon of God, through whom God fights. The idea of the spiritual warrior then allows for discussions of women without painting them as inherently violent or aggressive. Instead, the spiritual warrior is the martyr, an extension of maternal instincts and the idea that women are caretakers and, when necessary, protectors. But these self-sacrificial ideals, often associated with maternity, are not, nor should they be, a requirement for womanhood.</p><p dir="ltr">I argue that in order to create a capacious enough definition of “woman” and even femininity, we must prize definitions of femininity from the grip of the patriarchy. What if we took these women on their own terms, instead? I seek to do exactly this: to examine, throughout this dissertation, both the ways that violent women act and what they say, without considering how their behavior might, nonetheless, be understood to conform to limiting ideas of femininity (such as the virgin or the whore). I thereby invite us to think about what it means when violent women enact their will on the world; and I also attend to the physical, in addition to the spiritual, effects of this violence (like killing someone). My work suggests that, in order to take gender seriously, we must pay attention to these moments when women hurt or kill either someone else or themselves.</p>
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The shepherd metaphor in the Old Testament, and its use in pastoral and leadership modelsGan, Jonathan 01 1900 (has links)
Bibliography: leaves 441-459 / The shepherd metaphor is a prominent and significant one in the Old Testament.
However, it has shifted from an agrarian context, of shepherd and sheep in the literal
sense, to a socio-political context, of rulers and people in the political sense: a king is a
shepherd to the people. A careful review of the given metaphor raises the question
whether the metaphor should be the basis of the pastoral and leadership models that
are derived from the image of the shepherd, and whether such models can be enriched
by the analysis of the said metaphor as applied to the implementation of the
shepherding responsibility described in the Old Testament.
This research aims to examine various pastoral and leadership models and their use of
the shepherd metaphor in the light of the significance of the said metaphor in the Old
Testament. It utilises rhetorical criticism in consultation with metaphorical theory to
examine the given metaphor used in the models of pastoral and leadership roles and
their relationship with the shepherd metaphor in the New Testament. The objective is
threefold: (1) exploring the use of the shepherd metaphor in the Old Testament; (2)
examining the use of the shepherd metaphor in pastoral and leadership models, which
could include pointing out that some of these models rely heavily on their understanding
of New Testament uses of this metaphor; and (3) comparing the Old Testament and
pastoral/leadership models’ uses of the shepherd metaphor and drawing conclusions
based on this comparison. To achieve that end, the discussion also includes the ancient
Near Eastern literature and deuterocanonical texts. The thesis shows that a careful analysis of the uses of the shepherd metaphor in the Old Testament could enrich the
literature on Christian leadership as well as pastoral models that use this metaphor as
their point of departure. / Old Testament and Ancient Near Eastern Studies / D. Phil. (Old Testament)
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